Publication: Mosaic (Winnipeg)
Publication Date: 01-JUN-04
Format: Online - approximately 8960 words
Delivery: Immediate Online Access
Author: Gana, Nouri
Article Excerpt
By reading Freud's metapsychological papers in tandem with Shakespeare's Hamlet, this essay strives both to caution against the boomerang effects inherent in the psychically volatile act of remembering, effects that are oftentimes slighted or completely overlooked by the currently proliferating positivistic discourses of remembering, and to offer thereof a corrective to many previous psychoanalytic diagnoses of Shakespeare's most worked-over play.
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HAMLET: I am most dreadfully attended. POLONIUS: Thus it remains, and the remainder thus. Perpend.
In contemporary debates about the dynamics of remembering and mourning, Freud's clinically and analytically informed theoretical heritage is still of unsurpassable validity. Two essays, in particular, articulate quite fully Freud's stance on these two inextricably bound questions: "Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through" and "Mourning and Melancholia." The broad strokes of Freud's assumptions can be elicited by means of a simple exercise of reshuffling and repartitioning of the words that constitute the titles of both essays. Accordingly, we can state that the act of remembering can either devolve into fragmentary cycles of "compulsive repeating" and pathological "melancholia," or build up toward a therapeutic process of "working-through" and "mourning."
In "Mourning and Melancholia," Freud distinguishes mourning from melancholia all the while attributing both of them to a common origin: loss. Freud contends that, although both affects originate in (a reaction to) loss, they diverge in their ways of dealing with it. While mourning is a normal affect that is accomplished once all object-cathexes are withdrawn from the lost object and displaced onto a new object, melancholia results from an unfaltering fixation on the lost object and culminates in a regressive process of incorporating, if not devouring, the lost other--a process that might eventually enact a primary narcissism, and that Freud suspects of being of a pathological disposition. Thus, whereas in mourning the lost object is remembered so as to be consciously knitted, in accordance with the commands of reality, into the texture of the psyche, in melancholia the object is unconsciously engraved within the psyche. In "The Ego and the Id," Freud maintains that the ego fraudulently "assumes the features of [the lost] object" (369) and forces itself upon the id as its (lost/regained) love-object in order not only to confiscate its entire libido but also to retouch base with an infantile experience of narcissism. What is worthy of note here is that, in melancholia, remembering (the lost love-object) emerges, in Freud's common idiom, in the form of a regression of the ego into an earlier cannibalistic oral phase. In this respect, the outbreak of melancholia can be seen, as I demonstrate here, as the product of a compulsion to repeat an infantile (primary) ego-narcissism.
Freud's engagement with the pitfalls of remembering, however, should be seen as clinical attempts to ensure the firm seal of mourning over all ruminated material. In "Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through," he points out that the role of the analyst lies precisely in his ability "to keep in the psychical sphere all the impulses which the patient would like to direct into the motor sphere" (153). The analyst must, in other words, have the transferential wherewithal to participate in the memories of the analysand in such a way as to preclude their outward enactment. At the heart of this contention is Freud's unwavering counter-Nietzschean assumption that forgetting, far from being productive, is in fact the handmaiden of repression: "Forgetting impressions, scenes or experiences nearly always reduces itself to shutting them off" (148). Small wonder, then, that Freud deems it a triumph worthy of celebration if the analyst "can bring it about that something that the patient wishes to discharge in action is disposed of through the work of remembering" (153). The analyst has, in other words, to turn the compulsion to repeat into a "motive for remembering" (154) or, more precisely, into an "impulsion to remember" (151). Remembering becomes thus the sine qua non for the success of the treatment, on which depends not only the cure of the analysand but also the acknowledgement of the role of the analyst and of psychoanalysis writ large.
Yet remembering--which has now forcefully become a cult ethics of post-holocaust, post-apartheid, and post-colonial studies--does not, as Freud himself cautions us, proffer a failsafe algorithm for negotiating and working through the layers of indelible and disquieting (historical, individual, or collective) memories. In other words, remembering might technically help us "come to terms" with our painful memories as much as it can go awry--in the direction of compulsive repeating and/or melancholia. While much work has been done on what I elsewhere (34) conceptualized as a mournfulfilling remembering (literally, a remembering that seeks to fulfill the task of mourning), much less has been devoted to exploring the mournfilling remembering (the kind of remembering that ultimately foments the affect of mourning and/or melancholia rather than mollifies them) precisely because it strikes, I think, terribly human, all too human!
A widening circle of post-Freudians, including Nicolas Abraham, Maria Torok, and Dominick LaCapra, among many others (for recent accounts, see: Eng et al.; Simon et al.; Bal et al.), have dwelled almost exclusively on the means whereby a "successful" mourning can be achieved, and have impatiently banished melancholia, interminable mourning and the compulsion-repetition to the sanctuary of the pathological. While I am here adopting an attitude neither of "objective cynicism" (Zizek 695) nor of praise (Butler 162) vis-a-vis melancholia, I nonetheless think that it is time we interrogated the as-yet argumentum and hominem: one can remember (the lost love-object) and can still accomplish the task of mourning. One is, whenever within the moulds of remembering, already within the contours of a gnomic mourning. To break out of the moulds of mourning--to accomplish mourning--one has, perhaps, to start by excoriating one's memory, by laying to rest the clinical myth of curative remembering. One has, in the words of Derek Walcott, to "return through a darkness whose terminus is amnesia" (5). Hamlet himself knows only too well the palliative magic of forgetting: "Most necessary 'tis to forget/To pay ourselves what to ourselves is debt" (3.2.92).
Since remembering qua remembering is not an Aladdin-like magical lamp that can instantaneously concretize recovery-promises, the tendency has been since Freud to supplement it with a process of working-through, 'Durcharbeiten,' that would, given time, culminate in an achieved mourning. Yet, what is precisely most disquieting, if not abusive, about the act of remembering itself is that it suspends sine die the process of withdrawal and displacement of cathexes, that is, the process of affective closure that mourning is said to effect. Thus, while the act of remembering is based on the premise of remembering for-bidding mourning--that is, for (the sake of) bidding (farewell to) mourning--it tends exceedingly to mutate into an act of remembering (totally) forbidding mourning. By relying on the dormant equivocalness of the word for-bidding itself, I would like to capture the uncompromising nature of the business of remembering. It is, however, on the remembering forbidding mourning--the mournfilling remembering, in which the wedge is opened up for melancholia and compulsion repetition to take control of the psychic apparatus--that I would like to reflect henceforth.
Let me state from the beginning that a remembering forbidding mourning has more than one corollary. For the sake of the economy of my argument, I delineate only three corollaries, and I explore their manifestations and implications in variable depths by recourse to one of Shakespeare's most complex characters: Hamlet. These three corollaries can be grouped under two headings: (1) the affective corollaries, which pertain to what Freud calls the "psychical sphere," and (2) the actantial corollaries, which pertain in turn to what he calls the "motor sphere." I believe that a work of mourning predicated on an unstinting--ultimately, plural and repetitive--effort at remembering tends to be paradoxically debilitated and flattened by too much thought attended to the lost (person, object, idea) and becomes therefore burdensome, mechanical, and dull before it freezes gradually into indifference. Mourning is, by virtue of being weaned on remembering, perforce forbidden, but it can pulverize into fragmentary states of emotional numbness (indifference) or other, no less fragmentary but more taxing, states of emotional overflow (melanxiety--a composite emotional current that yokes together a melancholic fixation on the past and an anxious prescience of the future).
The...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.
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